The Qibble Blogtag:old.qi.com,2009-01-09:/qi_quibble_blog//12012-11-05T17:57:41ZMovable Type 4.23-enJumble Fail?tag:old.qi.com,2012:/qi_quibble_blog//1.7492012-11-05T17:50:44Z2012-11-05T17:57:41ZWe have received much correspondence in the last few days about Stephen's deck of cards in the 'Jumble' episode of series J. Was it shameful mathematics that led him to claim that no pack in history had ever been in that same order?eggshaped

We have received much correspondence in the
last few days about Stephen's deck of cards in the 'Jumble' episode of series J. Was it shameful mathematics that led him to
claim that no pack in history had ever been in that same order?

Well here were the claims that Stephen
made:

'I am going to do something that has never
been done by any human being since the beginning of time.'

'That pack of cards has never before, in
the history of our planet been in that order'

'I can say with all the mathematical
certainty that is possible that this pack of cards has never been in this order
before. It's an absolute world first!'

It seems that the problem is the phrase
'mathematical certainty' which was said in the excitement of the moment and
which many people have (reasonably enough) taken as a reference to a pure
mathematical concept rather than a practical mathematical reality. However, generally speaking we stand by the
claims made on the show. We do believe
that nobody has ever had that exact shuffle before and we think that the maths
backs us up. It's possible that we're
wrong, but then it's also possible that if we etched a grain of sand with the
word QI and hid it randomly somewhere on the earth's beaches, you could stumble
across it at the first time of asking.
In fact, that feat would be positively commonplace compared with Stephen's
being a repeat of an earlier shuffle.

While we completely agree with the
multitudes of quibblers who point out that it is not impossible that Stephen's
shuffle had been done the day before, or the day after, or in fact any time
that anyone has shuffled a pack of cards, it is so vanishingly unlikely that
practically speaking we can confidently say that it has never happened before.

We tried to show how close to zero this
probability was by the following explanation:

'That number is so big that were you to
imagine that if every star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, each with a
trillion people living on them, and each of these people had a trillion pack of
cards, and somehow they managed to shuffle them all a thousand times a second,
and they'd been doing that since the big bang, they would only just now be
starting to repeat shuffles.'

Now the eagle-eyed mathematicians out there
might notice an error in there. In order
for this sentence to make sense, it is vitally important to point out that this
only holds if each shuffle is unique. Practically
speaking, having shuffled so many trillions and trillions of times, our
other-worldly shufflers would likely find some repetition. Repetition is unlikely, but as the number of
shuffles increases, it becomes inevitable.

To sum up: practically speaking we feel
that we were on safe ground in saying that Stephen's pack was shuffled in a way
that never been done by any human being since the beginning of time, but we
certainly could have been more elegant in our language. Probability is a slippery thing, in fact Bruno de Finetti, the Italian
probabilist, held that 'probability does not exist', rather that it is just a
subjective thing about how much you are prepared to bet on a certain
outcome.

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Jerusalem Walliestag:old.qi.com,2012:/qi_quibble_blog//1.7332012-10-16T09:17:56Z2012-10-16T10:09:15Zeggshaped
elves@qi.com are to be believed, but mistakes are inevitable in all forms of media and it seems like we dropped a couple of clangers about the song 'Jerusalem' in our J-Places episode. In order to explain what went wrong, I'll let you into the workings of the show - specifically the route that a factoid takes to become a fully formed QI question.

Often our first port of call for any subject are works of reference. We'll check the Oxford English Dictionary, Encyclopaedia Britannica (we have three full volumes in the QI Office) and, of course, Wikipedia, before going onto specific web searches or books. This is often not to form a question, but to get an overview - we try to approach each subject from a position of 'know-nothing', no matter how familiar we are.

And so, having looked at a couple of other reference books (including the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography where we could read the story of Jerusalem Whaley which was also used on the show) we checked out Wikipedia, and sure enough found a mini piece of General Ignorance, that the song known as 'Jerusalem' is based on a poem not of the same name, but called 'And did those feet in ancient time'. This is all good for our purposes, so the fact was posted on our talkboards at qi.com/talk (where we conduct our research) and mostly forgotten about until it was time to curate a script about J-places.

The curator's job is then to cobble together all of the semi-formed ideas into a cohesive script, which he presents to the team. The elves will then try to improve wording and ordering before the final draft goes to our Producer for a once-over, then to Mr Lloyd to read through and then to our script-editor (me) to ensure factual accuracy, at this stage it goes back to the curator to ensure that he is happy. At any of these junctures a question can get changed, added or removed, and that seems to be what happened here, as the question was transformed from 'What was the name of the poem?' to 'Where does the term 'Chariots of Fire' come from?'

So far, so good you might think, it's a much better question, apart from the fact that the term 'Chariots of Fire' did not originally come from Blake's poem, the term is actually much older than that - it appears in the Bible, specifically 2 Kings 6:17: 'Then Elisha prayed and said, "O Lord, I pray, open his eyes that he may see." And the Lord opened the servant's eyes, and he saw; and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha."'

So a real error, and a 'mea culpa' from the guy who's supposed to check the scripts for factual accuracy. But it is really great that people take the time to let us know when we get things wrong, it shows a true QI spirit, and I hope that if you notice anything that doesn't seem quite right in the rest of the series you'll get on your keyboard and put us straight.

Postscript.

There is actually a secondary quibble that the poem was actually untitled by Blake, and so would not have been called 'And did those feet in ancient time' at all. But we maintain that conventionally speaking, such works were known by their first line.

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Ancestor testertag:www.qi.com,2012:/qi_quibble_blog//1.6792012-01-13T15:56:30Z2012-01-13T15:58:51ZNot every QI question has to have a definitive answer - in fact it is a fundamental QI tenet that we know so little about *everything* that it is almost impossible to say *anything* with any certainty. Should a subject come to light without an accepted viewpoint then we won't shy away from it - rather we'll attempt to start a discussion...eggshaped
Not every QI question has to have a definitive answer - in fact it is a fundamental QI tenet that we know so little about *everything* that it is almost impossible to say *anything* with any certainty. Should a subject come to light without an accepted viewpoint then we won't shy away from it - rather we'll attempt to start a discussion.

We recently looked at the rather sticky situation of the most common ancestor all humans - seeing as you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents etc... it stands to reason that you'll soon get to a mathematical imbalance whereby you have more relatives then there are people who have ever lived on earth - this is because we all share many many relatives.

We received a couple of angry e-mails claiming that the model that we used in the show - in which we said that everyone in the West was related to Charlemagne - was over-simplistic and based too much on mathematics rather than reality. While we accept that it was a mathematical question rather than a historical one, we were really attempting to get people thinking about the idea, rather than giving an authoritative answer.

The work that we cited belonged to Mark Humphrys, an academic at Dublin City University, so we could happily send links to his work to anyone who complained, but that technique was somewhat scuppered when Mr Humphrys himself wrote to us to say that we'd gotten his work slightly wrong:

"Hi guys

I was chuffed to be featured on QI "Greats" on Friday.

Just one small quibble: The Royal descent of Daniel Boone has been disproved.I suspect you got that from an old article about me, rather than the current version of my work.

There are several hundred other famous people with Royal descents (ultimately from Charlemagne) who you could have picked instead, including Boswell, de Sade, Goethe, Darwin, Francis Bacon, David Hume, Bertrand Russell, Bill Gates, Marie Antoinette, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, Anthony Eden, Lewis Carroll, Hugh Grant, Guy Ritchie, Brad Pitt, Rupert Everett, Ralph Fiennes, Johnny Dumfries, Barack Obama, Bush senior and junior, David Cameron, and hundreds more. See the page above for their descents."

Whoops. Sorry Mark, as you say, our information came from an article rather from your own website, and for that (but not for instigating a debate on a quite interesting subject) we apologise.

If you see anything that in QI's input that doesn't seem quite right, get in touch by e-mail at elves@qi.com or visit our talkboards at qi.com/talk

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A Guide to QI. Series I, Episode 13 'Intelligence'tag:www.qi.com,2011:/qi_quibble_blog//1.6672011-12-05T14:46:29Z2011-12-05T14:47:58ZResearch notes from the 'Intelligence' episode of QI - including a new trick from Asimo!!eggshaped

[Konrad] Lorenz once put a football-sized model egg by the nest of a
bird. The bird tried to retrieve it using the same action pattern it
would use for a normal sized egg. If a normal egg was placed alongside
the giant one, the bird made fruitless attempts to retrieve the big egg
while neglecting its own normal-sized egg. Lorenz called the exaggerated
sign stimulus a supernormal stimulus. Supernormal sign stimuli are bigger or more intense than normal. They elicit a larger-than-normal response from the animal.

We made a couple of errors in this part of the show, which have been pointed out to us. Firstly that Colossus was the first computer - it's a tough thing to put a time on, but the Zuse Z3 certainly predated Colossus:

He's learned a new trick since we last saw him - prepare to be amazed!

The number of piano tuners in the UK is an example of a 'Fermi Question' where the skill is to make reasoned guesses and estimates. The style is named after Enrico Fermi who supposedly loved the problems, here are some examples:

How many times do a clock's hands overlap in a day? Well as we said, the answer is 22, but we didn't explain quite why. One of the members of our wonderful forum, djgordy, explains it as well as any we've seen:

Suppose there are two people on a running track.
If one person does 24 laps and the second person stands still then the
person doing the laps will draw level with the person standing still 24
times. Now suppose that the person standing still decides to do some
walking laps but is much slower and does 2 laps in the time that the
running person takes to do 24 laps. The running person will now be
level with the walking person only 22 times.

By taking 2 laps himself, the walking man cancels out 2 laps advantage
that the running man had over him. If each lap is 100 meters, the
running man does 2,400 to the standing man's 0 metres. But in the second
instance the running man does 2,400m to the walking man's 200 m giving
him an advantage of 2,200 meters. Because the running man has only done
2,200 m more than the walking man he can only be level with him 22
times on a 100 m track.

Time Immemorial originally meant 6th July 1189, but we didn't have time to tell you that the meaning has now changed. In 1832 the law was changed and re-defined time immemorial
as "time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary". This
meant that rights which had been enjoyed for twenty years (or thirty
years against the Crown) shouldn't be forbidden merely because it could
be proved that they hadn't been enjoyed before.

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What did ninjas wear?tag:www.qi.com,2011:/qi_quibble_blog//1.6662011-12-02T12:14:21Z2011-12-07T13:37:21ZLast week on QI we said that Ninjas never wore black, however an expert on the subject has rather different thoughts...eggshaped

This excellent video was made by Antony Cummins of The Historical Ninjutsu Research Team, his website can be found here:

I knew you had used Dr Turnbull's work the moment I saw the programme.
In fact, I know Dr Turnbull. You may or may not know, but I will be appearing
next to Dr Turnbull next year as a co-expert on the upcoming documentary "Ninja
- Shadow Warriors". [...] To give Dr Turnbull the due respect, he did get his information from
Japanese sources, however, he went to secondary information from the 1960's
which is where the mistakes have been taken from.

So there you go. Thank you very much to Antony for his video and if you're interested in the history of Ninjas, then why not check out their documentary here:

And if you have anything more to add, be it in addition to Mr Cummins video, or in support of our original research, then make sure you get in touch with us at elves@qi.com - the truth is a slippery mistress, so we're always happy to share the knowledge as new information comes to light.]]>
A Guide to QI. Series I, Episode 12 'Illumination'tag:www.qi.com,2011:/qi_quibble_blog//1.6552011-11-28T14:40:57Z2011-11-28T14:43:42ZLots more on all of the subjects tackled in the "Illumination" episode of QI.eggshaped

And here is a full history of Blackpool Illuminations, should you want to learn more:

On the 19th September 1879 Dr Siemens' 8 dynamo-electric machines powered
by 16 Robey engines were used to power 8 arc lamps on the promenade spaced
320 yards apart, emitting the equivalent of 48,000 candles of light in total.
The event had been advertised nationally and between 70,000 and 100,000
visitors travelled from all over Britain to witness the event.

Our fact about Pancho Villa only fighting in the Daytime came from the Socialist newspaper The Morning Star:

And here's another video - explaining how the amazing bobtail squid uses bioluminesnce to hide its shadow:

The idea of ninjas clad in black costumes (shinobi shōzoku) is likely rooted in artistic convention - it's a fact that we got from Stephen Turnbull's book and here's evidence that the original geishas were men.

Many people think that people have one leg longer than the other, or that maybe one set of muscles are stronger than the other, and so we walk in circles, but a recent study showed that people sometimes spin clockwise and other times spin anticlockwise:

The Indigenous Australian Pormpuraaw people, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, and would say, for instance, that "the salad forks have been placed southeast of the dinner forks" were written about in Scientific American 01/02/2011

Here are some great shots of the Australian Morning Glory cloud:

And here's the Indian Granny Cloud - what a great idea!

The difference between a black body in astronomy, and what you or I might consider a black body can be read here:

Indeed, it is true that light which is generated by nuclear fusion reactions in the center of the Sun takes a very
long time to escape and reach Earth. A million years is towards the
high end of the estimates I have seen, but it certainly takes many
thousands of years.

And finally this week, here is a site that tells you that a no-eyed big-eyed wolf spider has no eyes, not big eyes:

http://www.earthsendangered.com/profile-856.html
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A Guide to QI. Series I, Episode 11 'Infantile'tag:www.qi.com,2011:/qi_quibble_blog//1.6462011-11-21T13:09:21Z2011-11-21T14:15:59ZThis week's QI was chock-full of amazing facts, along with a few fun and games. Learn more about the subjects we broached here...eggshaped
Fran Beauman is an extremely 'QI' writer, in fact, I believe she almost became a QI researcher, but instead decided to do her own thing, writing a number of truly excellent books, that we would recommend to anyone who likes what we do. Her latest book is called: Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad 1695 - 2010: and it's from here that we got the fact about the Pope's father meeting his wife...

Her explanation of tiddlywinks was even more excitable than we mentioned on the show:

"After dinner we all played the most exciting
game that was ever invented, called Tiddleywinks. It consists in
flipping counters into a bowl, and being a good number we played at two
tables...and the excitement was tremendous. I assure you everyone's
character changed at Tiddleywinks in the most marvellous way. To begin
with, everyone begins to scream at the top of their voices and to accuse
everyone else of cheating. Even I forgot my shyness and howled with
excitement...Lord Wolmer flicked all the counters off the table and
cheated in every possible way. George was very distressed at this and
conscientiously picked every counter up again...I assure you no words can picture either the intense excitement or the noise. I almost scream in describing it."

Indoor pub rifle-shooting was all the rage in Birmingham in the early 20th century according to the book 'Played at the pub' by Arthur Taylor,a book that gives you more than you could ever wish for about indoor games in Britain. He explains how the scoring system worked:

The target had a bell fitted to its bullseye, so
everyone would know when that was hit; the rest of the target was
painted white in non-drying paint. After each man's go, the paint was
reapplied.

And in fact, if you were wondering how Dave Gorman knew so much about indoor games, perhaps its something to do with the fact that his new book is all about him playing games against people. Here he is, reading from "Dave Gorman vs the Rest of the World":

Here's a site all about Coney Island history, which tells you about the amazing infant incubator exhibit:

The original forceps are currently in the Royal College of Obstetricians
and Gynaecologists in London.

Karl August Bier (1861-1049) who invented the epidural in 1898 once said: "Medical scientists are nice people, but you should not let them treat you!"
which sounds like rather a good idea seeing as to test the area was numb Bier 'pulled the man's
pubic hair, yanked his testicles, hit him in the legs with a hammer and
singed his thighs with a cigar'.

Goodbye waves, musical phrases, and infants' bouts of babbling and gesturing all last about 3 seconds. Many basic physiological events, such as relaxed breathing and certain nervous system functions do, too. A 1994 study of giraffes, okapis, roe deer, raccoons, pandas, and
kangaroos living in zoos, for example, found that although the duration
of the animals' every move, from chewing to defecating, varied
considerably, the average was, you guessed it, 3 seconds.

It's an extremely interesting subject - here are some sources if you want to read more:

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A Guide to QI. Series I, Episode 10 'Inland Revenue'tag:www.qi.com,2011:/qi_quibble_blog//1.6412011-11-14T13:06:09Z2011-11-14T14:15:34ZA guide to the 11th episode of the I series of QI. Entitled 'Inland Revenue'eggshaped

Here is the news article about the Bank Robber in the Netherlands who claimed his gun as a deductible expense:

But we have one caveat: It's impossible to judge the relative
amounts when comparing Roman Italy and USAian America. The statistics in the above article
make him look like he's by far the richest by looking at Diocles's relative wealth compared with his compatriots, but other stats - such as
looking at how much gold you could buy with his winnings would make him
an order of magnitude less rich than Tiger Woods.

The question about Mary and Joseph not going home for a census came from our resident historian, Justin Pollard. He cites the following books, if you'd like to learn more:The Nativity: History and Legend and The Historical Figure of Jesus. We've had a couple of queries about this subject, citing Gaius Vibius Maximus:

"Seeing
that the time has come for the house to house census, it is necessary
to compel all those who for any cause whatsoever are residing out of
their districts to return to their own homes, that they may both carry
out the regular order of the census, and may also attend diligently to
the cultivation of their allotments."

I think this is one we will revisit here on the Quibble Blog soon, so stay tuned.

The question about modern-day censuses came from Geographic Magazine May 2011, and here's a great article about a German census protest which wasn't mentioned on the show:

A year ago, we talked about the tongue-eating louse, and Dara was incredulous:

When we found out that fish don't have tongues - which we think is Quite Interesting in itself, and remembering that we'd punished Dara in the past, we thought it a great opportunity to redress the balance.

Thankyou to Andrew Cassely who points out to us that Ramanujan was *not* the first Indian to join the Royal Society, that honour actually goes to Ardaseer Cursetjee a 19th century shipbuilder.

And thankyou to Richard Mulholland who gives us the following interesting fact about the number 12,407:

12,407 has only two prime factors, 19 and 654, and if one takes the sum: 12,407 =19*654 and adds the digits individually until one ends up with single figure results, one will get the following:

(1+2+4+0+7) = (1+9) *(6+5+3)
(1+4) = (1+0) *(1+4)
5 = 1 *5

which is another true equation.

Which we agree is Quite Interesting, so maybe the search goes on for another boring number?

Finally, there is some controversy about which is the heaviest bird that can fly. We said the mute swan (having found the information in the Encyclopedia Britannica) but we've had many e-mails from ornithologists claiming that in fact the bustard is bigger. Do you know for sure? Send any evidence that you might have to elves@qi.com but in the meantime, here is some evidence that mute swans are not, as their name suggests, mute:

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A Guide to QI. Series I, Episode 9 'Illness'tag:www.qi.com,2011:/qi_quibble_blog//1.6332011-11-07T13:44:37Z2011-11-07T13:46:00ZCitations ahoy! It's the research-notes from our 'illness' episode of QI.eggshapedhttp://www.stanford.edu/~dement/epworth.html

and for more information, check out the official website of the Index's inventor, Dr Murray Johns, here:

The perpetual pill of antimony which was a small lump of Antimony that was swallowed, fished out of the patient's stool, cleaned off, and used again and again can be read about in the excellent book: "The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison" by John Emsley.

What else is Antimony used for? Well there's a video for most elements on Youtube - and here is the antimony one:

The shepherd of the anus of the pharoah is well attested over the net, for instance, in this well-written article on medicine in Ancient Egypt:

Our resident scientist and web king, known in these parts as Dr.Bob, read through Ben Goldacre's bad science book and took out all of the most interesting facts related to the placebo effect. There is way too much to replicate here, but you can read the whole post on our talkboards:

The question about 'Intelligent Falling' as we wrote it was actually about the difference between
the scientific use of the word 'Theory' and the layman's use. We
attempted to invoke the idea of "Intelligent Falling" to those ends, but
perhaps that wasn't all that intelligent of us, as it ended up being a
rant againt the American Intelligent Design movement.

Here is a video about 'Intelligent Falling':

...and who better, given the fact that the question turned into a rant against religion, to explain the point we were trying to put across about the word "theory" than Richard Dawkins:

Drapetomania, the pseudo-medical term coined to describe a
'disease' found among black slaves in the United States. The main
symptom of the disease was their desire to run away from their masters. Can be read about in Arthur Caplan's book: 'Health, Disease and Illness' as well as in the following websites:

and the fact that catharsis--"letting it all out"--isn't helpful
and, in fact, may increase an angry person's hostility comes from a 1999
study by psychologist Brad Bushman, PhD, and colleagues, published in
the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 76, No. 3).

"We all understand targets in the policy world. I remember being in the
room when we were being briefed by Americans on five-a-day, which we
adopted from them. They chose five partly as it was considered a nice
round sum and partly because it seemed possible, given how low
consumption of fruit and vegetables was."

And finally. Setting fire to farts. This most scatological of questions came from the reading of the book: "Who Cut The Cheese":

It's a must-read for anyone who likes obscure facts and farting.

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The QI Settag:www.qi.com,2011:/qi_quibble_blog//1.6282011-10-31T12:55:12Z2011-10-31T13:44:08ZOne of the most common questions that we get at QI (if you ignore the ones asking why we said that there was more than one moon) is about the set. Who designed it? And what's the story with that spiral?eggshapedOur set at QI is rebuilt for every show. In fact, often by the time Stephen, Alan and guests have removed their microphones and arrived in the green room, the studio is nothing but a shell waiting for the next day's filming session, whatever it may be. In between recordings it sits in a backstage area, along with the "Have I Got News For You" screens containing various newspaper cuttings, and various other odds and sods from shows filmed at The London Studios.

The set itself was designed by Jonathan Paul Green, who was also responsible for shows such as Mock the Week and TopGear. You can check out his website here:

But what about the most common specific query that we receive? It's all about the spiral on Stephen's desk. Is it a golden spiral? A logarithmic spiral? Or something else?

Well here is Jonathan's sketch of the design:

And as you can see, it is made by joining-up the vertices of various rectangles, which means that the
spiral is actually more like a fibonacci spiral than a golden spiral. The two spirals are close enough to be almost identical, but the "golden spiral" is
created simply by using the exact "Golden Ratio" (1:1.618) to determine the rate at which it leaves the centre, while the
Fibonacci series joins corners of rectangles of the golden ratio. The two spirals get more and more similar as the
numbers get higher, but are not the same.

The
golden spiral is famous because it appears a lot in nature (in the centre of a sunflower for instance) and is a special case of the
"logarithmic spiral" which mathematician Jacob Bernoulli loved to study;
he called it the "Spira Mirabilis." He wanted one to be inscribed on
his tomb, but unforunately the stone-mason was not much of a
mathematician and if you visit Bernoulli's resting place in Basel, you
can see that he is interred under a rather more boring archimedean
spiral.

But we probably shouldn't mock poor old Bernoulli. You see, in fact, while Jonathan used the Golden Spiral as his inspiration for the set, and drew what looks like a fibonacci spiral, if one gets up close and measures the set, one will find that ratios of the defining rectangles are 1.24 to 1 (central) and 1.76 to 1 (outer) - nowhere near the golden ratio of 1.618 to 1. Such a fudge was necessary in order to make the set look aesthetically pleasing, and so the spiral is actually neither a golden spiral, nor is it a fibonacci spiral - perhaps we should call it a 'QI Spiral' or maybe a 'JPG Design Spiral'.

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A Guide to QI. Series I, Episode 8 'inequality and injustice'tag:www.qi.com,2011:/qi_quibble_blog//1.6272011-10-31T11:35:40Z2011-10-31T12:47:15ZWant to read more about bestiality in the early US, or cheating in sports? Come this way...eggshaped
George Spencer 'who didst lie with a beast'. It was such an incredible story, that we decided to build a show around it.

If you want to read more about bestiality in Early America, then what's wrong with you? But here is a great snippet anyway:

Our resident historian goes even further to debunk the Pilgrim Fathers story:

Firstly the Pilgrim Fathers were not Puritans.
Puritans stayed in the old country (and the old church) to 'purify' it.
Those who simply couldn't bear to stay with all those heathens or in
their horrible church but decided to set up their own church or just
bugger off to pastures new instead were known as 'Seperatists'. Puritans
don't really start emigrating until after 1630. The New Haven colony were Puritans.

The Pilgrim Fathers were also not known at the time as Pilgrim Fathers
(although William Bradford used the imagery of Hebrews 11:13-16, about
Old Testament "strangers and pilgrims". The first documented use of
Pilgrims (that was not simply quoting Bradford) was at a December 22,
1798 celebration of Forefathers' Day, in Boston. The crew of the
Mayflower called them "Psalm-singing puke stockings". The 28 most
fervent in the group were known as 'the saints' and the rest as
'strangers'.

The Mayflower first dropped anchor at Provincetown, not Plymouth, nor
was Plymouth named by the Pilgrims after the English port from which
they left. That was just a co-incidence as the settlement had already
been named Plymouth by John Smith from the Charlestown expedition who
had petitioned the king to be allowed to give the coastal settlements
what he considered proper English names.

For more on whipping boys and scapegoats, check out this article from the excellent www.phrases.org

During the 16th century, Justice was
often portrayed with a blindfold. The origin of the blindfold is
unclear, but it seems to have been added to indicate the tolerance of,
or ignorance to, abuse of the law by the judicial system. Today, the
blindfold is generally accepted as a symbol of impartiality, but may be
used to signify these other traits in political cartoons. http://www.supremecourt.gov/about/figuresofjustice.pdf

What we did find out was that the answer to our question: "What is Lady Justice looking at" is pretty much "Fleet Street" which is somewhat ironic given the current climate of blame aimed at the fourth estate.

We have since had a couple of messages complaining that we used the word "Leper" which is generally thought to be outdated and unhelpful to those with the disease. Apologies to anyone offended, but thankfully some of those who complained did say that we represented the disease fairly in all other respects, so hopefully that is at least some comfort.

And finally, when we read that new hairs in bald men become microscopic rather than disappearing completely we couldn't wait to see what our folically-challenged panelists thought about it. It was just too perfect a General Ignorance question to be true... Sorry Clive.

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New Research: "Why Don't We Have More Women On QI?"tag:www.qi.com,2011:/qi_quibble_blog//1.6122011-10-25T10:48:26Z2011-10-25T11:00:40ZSome new research has come to light on the question of men & women in humour. Does it agree with, or contradict, what we said?eggshapedA study by Robert Provine at the University of Maryland showed that womenlaugh more than men, and that both men & womenlaugh less at women than they do to men.

The new research says:

A study in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review finds that men might have a tiny edge over women in producing humor but the gap is too small to account for the stereotype. Scientists had 16 male and 16 female subjects write funny captions for 20 New Yorker magazine cartoons, men's captions rated higher on average than women's captions. But only by a mere 0.11 points out of perfect score of 5.0.

Prairie dogs, research has revealed, have a pretty advanced language,
mostly used, of course, for giving warnings about approaching
predators. Oddly, they also have "words" (that is, particular barks used
uniquely to identify one species of animal) for animals that offer them
no threat: they'll bark "cow" if they see a cow coming. This "seems to
be just an informational item, as none of the [dogs] run or show any
concern." It's just chat, in other words.

What's most exciting about the research is that it has proven that the prairie
dogs coin new "words" for unfamiliar objects. When the scientists
"wheeled a 32-by-26-inch black oval plywood shape across the colony on a
pulley system, all the prairie dogs gave the same unique call," even though this was something they'd never seen before.

We then looked further into the research, which was done by Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University. Here is his website if you'd like to know more:

Our question about the second-commonest gas in the universe began life as a fact about how the world is running out of helium. Basically in 30 years we won't have any helium balloons at all. Which is a bit sad for our grandchildren.

One of the QI elves, Justin Pollard, is an acclaimed historian, and he says of "The Present":

For archaeologists using BP (Before Present) dating, the epochal reference date is January 1st 1950 which is considered to be 'the present'. The date was chosen as it was just before the ratio of Carbon 14 to Carbon 12 in the atmosphere (needed for C14 dating) was buggered up by large-scale atmospheric nuclear tests.

This week's "Ingenious Interlude" was inspired by this wonderful video from Professor Richard Wiseman, which included a number of different experiments:

We had decided to do a "Titanic" question in the I series of QI quite early on, but really struggled to find anything jaw-droppingly interesting. But when we found out that as the Titanic
hit the iceberg First Officer Murdoch gave the famous order to
Quartermaster Hichens, "Hard-a-starboard!". Hichens turned the wheel
rapidly to port and Titanic turned to port, not quite avoiding the iceberg, we decided that it was definitely going to get us a *Klaxon*. There is more on the subject here:

Oceans of liquid diamond, filled with solid diamond icebergs, could be
floating on Neptune and Uranus, according to a recent article in the
journal Nature Physics.

We spoke to astrophysicist Professor Duncan Forbes about the definition of a galaxy after we found out that there was no accepted definition. Here is a site where you can read about Professor Forbes's task:

and here is a picture of globular cluster Omega Centauri which will soon be known as a galaxy:

Finally, in this show was a sneaky little General Ignorance trap. We found it amusing that there are insects called webspinners that spin webs, where, of course, spiders are not insects. It seemed certain that we would get the *Klaxon* and sure enough, it worked. Here is some more information about webspinners if you'd like to know more about them:

and didn't believe us that goat milk can be used to create silk? Well here's the story...

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A Guide to QI. Series I, Episode 6 'Inventive'tag:www.qi.com,2011:/qi_quibble_blog//1.6102011-10-17T13:08:15Z2011-10-17T14:40:26ZFind out more about the subjects broached in the "Invention" episode of QI.eggshaped

We had a number of other people who had been killed by their own inventions in our files, William Bullock's fate is nicely explained in his wikipedia article:

While Franz Reichelt, who jumped off the Eiffel Tower using a self-designed overcoat as a parachute, can be seen in the below clip (WARNING. The following video is of a man plummeting to his death.)

Nina Conti's appearance on QI gave us the chance to talk about ventriloquism:

"It is a wickedness lurking in the human belly and deserving to dwell in the cesspool,"
wrote Photius, a ninth-century patriarch of Constantinople, "an impure
breath which some people, on account of their overwhelming pity, call
ventriloquism."

And the story of Elizabeth Barton, the English Catholic nun who claimed that she was hearing spirits
through her abdomen can be read in, Adam's Navel by Michael Sims.

We didn't get a chance to include many facts about imaginary friends before the conversation descended into pussy-hounding:

There was a time when some parents worried about
their children talking to invisible pals - but the fashion these days is
to consider it a wholly positive phenomenon.
It's hypothesized by some researchers that children with imaginary
friends develop better language skills, ability to learn, emotional
responsiveness, and creativity, because of the conversations they have
with their IFs, in which they have to make up both sides of the dialogue
(er - obviously).
No-one knows how common IFs are - but one survey in the US suggested that 65% of children under 7 admitted to having imaginary friends. About a third of imaginary friends, research says, are actually Imaginary Enemies.

If any viewers have imaginary
friends (and let's face it, it's pretty likely) you can help with this
research by filling in Dr Karen Majors' (Community Psychology Service, Barking and Dagenham) questionnaire. Get a copy here:
k.majors@ioe.ac.uk .

The inventions that we gave out to each panelist came from the Maurice Collins Collection whose website can be seen here:

...and while we're talking Dinosaur Sex, here's a video by our friend Emmy the Great's singing her song of the same name:

We're not sure whether or not Rising Damp exists, but there are certainly a lot of people who don't and so we felt duty bound to report the discussion:

Stephen Boniface, former chairman of the
construction arm of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS),
has told the institute's 40,000 members that 'true risingdamp' is a myth and chemically injected damp-proof courses (DPC) are 'a complete waste of money'.

According to the Independent, Mike Parrett of Lewisham Council in London
has investigated over 5000 buildings and has never found a sign of risingdamp. TIn 1997 the council offered a £50 reward to anyone who could show them a case of risingdamp - none came forward.

Finally, do pigeons transmit disease? Well here is what BBC Nature Magazine have to say:

Many websites list the diseases recorded in feral pigeons.
How very scary. But let's put this in context - many more diseases are
known in people and their pets. Moreover, all animals carry diseases:
the key issue is how often they transfer to humans, and there is little
evidence of this happening with feral pigeons. Plus, domestic pigeons often come into contact with feral pigeons but stay perfectly healthy. In other words, feral pigeons simply do not pose a significant health risk. It's a non-issue.

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A Guide to QI. Series I, Episode 5 'Invertebrates'tag:www.qi.com,2011:/qi_quibble_blog//1.6092011-10-10T10:53:13Z2011-10-10T12:15:39ZCreepy and Crawly research notes from our 'Invertebrate Special'eggshaped
episode one here) offering us 'animals dressed as humans' as an exhibit for our virtual museum; she also talked about beedogs.com which we took as our stepping point for question one of this year's invertebrate special "What can bees do better than dogs".

The fact that bees are used to sniff out drugs is a fact that we've had up our sleeve for years, ever since we read this story in 2007

74% of dog owners claim that they can see a guilty
look from their pet when it has done something wrong, but in most
cases, it seems like they are kidding themselves. By setting up
conditions where the owner was misinformed as to whether his or her dog
had really committed an offense, New York researcher Alexandra Horowitz
showed that people saw guilt in a dog's body language when they believe
the dog has done something it shouldn't have, even if the dog is in fact
completely innocent of any offense.

Having said that, though, James Worthington pointed in the direction of this youtube clip via our e-mail elves@qi.com, in which the dog certainly appears very remorseful!

The fact about venus fly traps came from BBC Wildlife magazine, March 2011. They said:

Each of the sensory hairs inside the trap acts as a lever; when pressed, it releases a burst of two different compounds (a potassium salt and a sugar complex) into the trap's tissue. One lever being pressed releases an amount of these compounds that is nearly, but not quite,
enough to trigger the response. The compounds dissipate over the next
30 seconds. But if a second lever is pressed within that time (by a live
prey moving around) then the amount of the compounds in the tissue goes
over the crucial point, and the trap is sprung.

So now you know.

We couldn't get a good photo of the Bolas spider that catches is prey by lasso for the show, but thanks to the wonders of the internet - you can actually see one catching its dinner in this clip:

Much of our material about worm charming was orginally used in the G Series of QI, but it was cut from the final recording, and thankfully Alan didn't remember the answer, so we looked at the subject again, and found the rather lovely fact about the worm-charming festival where nobody caught a single worm. Read all about the story here:

Sharks are vertebrates but they don't have a backbone. It's a basic point, but at least allowed Jimmy to make an excellent satirical joke. Here is what we provided for Stephen:

Sharks
skeletons are not like those of terrestrial vertebrates and bony fish,
they, like skates and rays, do not have a backbone. Their skeletons are
made of cartilage and connective tissue. This is flexible and hard
wearing but half as dense as bone. Having cartilage reduces the
skeleton's weight, saving energy. Sharks don't have a rib cage so on land a shark's own weight can crush it.

To save you from searching Google for gonorrhea, here's the link to the fact that they are currently thought to be the strongest-known organism:

It's just a slight mention, but one that got our General-Ignorance sense buzzing. And here's a bonus fact:

They took so many cockles/mussels out of
Morecombe Bay, in the early 1970s that the Ministry of Agriculture
ordered a cull. 10,000 birds were killed but it had precisely the
opposite effect to the one intended: with fewer oystercatchers,
the cockle stocks collapsed. This was because the birds are excellent
at weeding out the smaller shellfish, allowing room for the larger ones
to grow and reproduce.

Water fleas have the largest genome of any animal studied, which means it can, apparently, be a "modern, high-tech version" of a canary in a coal mine. More information here:

And finally before we wrap-up insects and invertebrates here's a little guy who never made the show. The question was to be "What do female stalk-eyed flies find sexy?" Check out the answer in this video...